(Stockholm+50) is an international meeting convened by the United Nations General Assembly to be held in Stockholm, Sweden from 2-3 June 2022.
It will commemorate the 50 years since the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, which made the environment a pressing global issue for the first time. Some 122 countries attended, and participants adopted a series of principles on the environment, including the Stockholm Declaration and Action Plan for the Human Environment. The United Nations Environment Programme was created as a result of the conference. Mr. Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the 1972 event, said the lasting message from the event was a “realization that man has come to one of those seminal points in his history where his own activities are the principle determinants of his own future.”
Now, 50 years after that Stockholm meeting, the world faces a triple planetary crisis of climate change, pollution and waste, nature and biodiversity loss, as well as other planetary ills that are affecting current and future prosperity and wellbeing. An unhealthy planet threatens human health, prosperity, equality and peace – as the world has seen only too clearly in COVID-19. It also threatens the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has described the triple planetary crisis as “our number one existential threat” that needs “an urgent, all-out effort to turn things around.”
Sweden will host Stockholm+50, with the support of Kenya. It will be during the same week as World Environment Day, which is held on 5 June each year and is also a result of the 1972 event.
Stockholm+50 will be collaborative and multi-stakeholder in nature, open to all participants who will be invited to share experiences and initiatives to protect the planet and contribute to sustainable and inclusive development, including a sustainable recovery from the COVID -19 pandemic.
The meeting will comprise an opening segment, four plenary meetings and three leadership dialogues, and a closing segment.
